Drop And Run!

One thing becomes brutally clear when you begin to post stories online on a regular basis, you tend to miss things the first time around. By missing things I mean, misspelled words, awkward phrasing, bad spacing, omitted words, or even sloppy punctuation. This is forgiven to a degree since most people are posting stories for fun in a carefree way. But you should never allow yourself to become the type of writer who is content just to "drop and run."

If you've taken the time to collect your thoughts and type them down, you should also have the courtesy to correct as many of the errors as you can, once you find them. It shows that you take pride in what you're writing and shows that you care about making the reading experience as painless as possible for potential readers.

To avoid the "drop and run" stigma, I usually take a couple of precautions when posting anything online now. First I type the post in a word document. This helps me to catch most spelling errors. Trust me, those little squiggly lines will help save you from some pretty bad typos. After that, you should proofread your post as many times as possible, to catch whatever errors that may still exist. Usually you'll find at least a few. But most importantly, you have to revisit your post several times, to check for errors again. By several times I mean more than twice.

I find rereading posts a few days after writing them to be the most helpful. My eyes and brain have had a break from my earlier thoughts and I'm less likely to insert small words like "of" into my paragraph when they aren't really there.

You basically have to become a rigid self editor if you want to make the reading experience as painless as possible for your readers. The only other option you have are to hire an editor to proof you post for you, which makes no sense, unless you're doing it for profit on a website. Beyond that, if you leave the errors in, readers will just think, "this person is a lazy writer" and you don't want them thinking that about you.

I feel the same way; I always find something new every time. I learn a lot about communicating, particularly my lack of skill when writing. I don't think people know how much they are misread until they try writing and receive feedback.

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